Hillary Clinton’s Iraq Dilemma

Like Jeb Bush’s public comments on the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton’s have gone through several iterations.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ETHAN MILLER/GETTY

A week after it began, the flap over Jeb Bush and Iraq still hasn’t fully died down. With his changing answers to the question that Megyn Kelly first posed to him, last Monday on Fox News, about whether he would have ordered an invasion in 2003 knowing what he knows now, the former Florida governor has provided campaign reporters with something juicy to write about, and Republican fretters with something to fret about.

If Dubya’s younger brother can’t avoid friendly fire in the confines of a Fox News interview, how will he handle it when the campaign proper begins?* The benign explanation is that he’s ring-rusty—thirteen years since his last election, and all that. But, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, darker suspicions are lurking. Perhaps Bush isn’t up to speed on international issues, or, worse, he’s too tied to his younger sibling to give the obvious answer to Kelly’s question: “No, no, no—a thousand times, no.”

In Democratic circles, the sight of Bush floundering was a welcome one. Barely had he emerged from the Fox interview when the Democratic National Committee put out a (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/dnc-attacks-jeb-bush-on-the-iraq-war/article/2564327), entitled “Don’t Get Fooled Again,” which intersperses his comments to Kelly with some footage from 2002 of George W. saying “Fool me once, shame on me. ... You can’t get fooled again.” The jabs keep coming. In Monday’s Times, Paul Krugman, one of the few commentators in the mainstream press who expressed skepticism in the run-up to the March, 2003 invasion, took the opportunity to get in another dig at George W. Bush, Don Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, et al, reminding his readers, “We were lied into war.”

Since 2007 or thereabouts, opinion polls have consistently showed that a sizable majority of Americans regard the Iraq invasion as a mistake. If the Democrats were likely to field a candidate in 2016 who opposed the war all along, they’d be in a position to exploit the issue for all it’s worth, just as Barack Obama did in 2008. But, unless something unexpected happens, the Democratic nominee will be Hillary Clinton, who, in October, 2002, voted for a congressional resolution that authorized the use of force against Iraq, and whose current take on the decision to go to war isn’t terribly easy to distinguish from the one that Jeb Bush has stumbled into.

Bush’s position, as he explained it in his second clarification last week, is the following: “ ‘Knowing what we know now, what would you have done?’ I would’ve not engaged; I would not have gone into Iraq. That’s not to say that the world is safer because Saddam Hussein is gone—it is significantly safer. That’s not to say that there was a courageous effort to bring about a surge that created stability in Iraq—all of that is true. ... But we’ve answered the question now.”

Clinton’s public statements, like Bush’s, have gone through several iterations. In September, 2007, she argued that she hadn’t, in fact, voted for a preëmptive war, and said, “Obviously, if I had known then what I know now about what the President would do with the authority that was given him, I would not have voted the way that I did.” Since many people regarded the resolution, at the time it passed, in October, 2002, as a blank check (twenty-one Democratic senators voted against it), this explanation didn’t do Clinton much good, but she stuck with it throughout her 2008 Presidential campaign, refusing to describe her vote as a mistake. In her 2014 memoir, “Hard Choices,” Clinton changed tack, fessing up and saying that she had relied heavily on prewar intelligence about Saddam’s programs to build weapons of mass destruction. “I should have stated my regret sooner and in the plainest, most direct language possible,” she wrote. She went on, “I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.”

That language was commendably clear. It means that Clinton and Bush are now agreed upon the proposition that, knowing what we know now, invading Iraq was an error. The two of them also agree that, once Saddam had been overthrown, the U.S.-led occupation bungled things by not providing adequate security inside Iraq. In her book, Clinton wrote that the United States “went to war in Iraq with only half a strategy.” In his interview with Kelly, Bush said, “Once we invaded and took out Saddam Hussein, we didn’t focus on security first, and the Iraqis in this incredibly insecure environment turned on the United States military because there was no security for themselves and their families. By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush.”

It was pretty rich of Jeb to cite his brother’s post-White House ruminations in an effort to exculpate the tragic errors of the Bush Administration. Nonetheless, Jeb’s statements to Kelly, in which he also included a direct reference to Clinton’s 2002 vote, highlighted the dilemma facing the Democratic front-runner. If she tries to use the Iraq issue against the Republicans, by, for example, warning that a G.O.P. President could end up blundering into another war, she will open herself to criticisms, counterattacks, and endless rehashings of her 2002 vote.

Is there a way around this problem? I think that perhaps there is. Rather than apologizing and complaining about faulty intelligence, Clinton could say that we all make mistakes, but the key thing is what we learn from them. In the case of the Republicans in general, and Jeb Bush in particular, she could argue convincingly that the learning process has hardly begun.

Despite Bush’s claim, during the big foreign-policy speech that he delivered in Chicago in February, that “I’m my own man,” it has been widely reported that he’s been consulting with some of his brother’s former advisers, including Paul Wolfowitz, who famously said that the Iraqis would “welcome us as liberators.” The speech itself relied on standard G.O.P. boilerplate—“Weakness invites war. Strength encourages peace”—and was devoid of novel ideas. Setting aside Rand Paul, who has virtually no chance of winning the nomination, there is precious little evidence of new thinking elsewhere in the Republican field, either. Indeed, Marco Rubio’s speech last week at the Council on Foreign Relations suggests that the candidates are trying to outdo each other in bellicosity.

Clinton, for her part, still has work to do to explain what she learned from the Iraq disaster. Clearly, it didn’t turn her against the concept of overseas military intervention. In 2011, as Secretary of State, she helped orchestrate air attacks on Libya that aided in bringing down Muammar Qaddafi, unleashing a civil war that is still raging. In 2013, after she left office, she supported U.S. military action against the Syrian regime, a course that President Obama eventually backed away from. In “Hard Choices,” however, she struck a cautious note. “As much as I have wanted to, I could never change my vote on Iraq,” she wrote. “But I could try to help us learn the right lessons from that war ... I was determined to do exactly that when facing future hard choices, with more experience, wisdom, skepticism, and humility.”

As the 2016 campaign unfolds, Clinton might want to say more about how her views have changed, and how, as President, she would reconcile her urge to exercise American power—both to protect U.S. interests and to do some good in the world—with the harsh realities of experience. Such a discussion would help shift attention away from her 2002 vote and allow her to draw a contrast with the Republicans’ empty rhetoric. More importantly, it would focus the campaign debate on the question that, ever since March, 2003, has been hovering over practically everything: Whither America after Iraq?

In his measured responses to international crises and his occasional flip-flops, President Obama has provided one answer, which harkens back to the cautious realism of the former national-security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. Would Clinton stick to Obama’s “Don’t do stupid stuff” philosophy? Based on her history, some analysts suspect that she remains, at heart, a neo-liberal interventionist, à la Tony Blair, or even, perhaps, an old-school Democratic hawk from the Scoop Jackson school. Understandably enough, given the controversy that followed critical remarks that she made last summer about the U.S.’s cautious policy in Syria, Clinton hasn’t said much during the past nine months that would help voters place her on the foreign-policy spectrum. Now that she’s officially a candidate for President, it’s time she helped them out a little.

_* This post was amended to specify that Jeb Bush is George W. Bush’s younger brother. _